Beyond the many discussed valuable benefits that it offers students and teachers alike, multimodal texts, because they move beyond the very “structural limitations of language” which have been historically known not only to oppress many discourse communities but also known to allow for the rationalization of what people may otherwise find unjust, immoral, unfair, violent, etc. (Fleckenstein 1997) and because they allow audiences a heightened cognitive experience (Gibbons 2008) appears to be the perfect entrypoint for composition teachers, including Leake (2016) and Blankenship (2019), who want to center empathy as the root of composition instruction. Claudia Rankine (2015), in regards to police violence, white supremacist ideologies, and racial bias in “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning,” invites us to recognize the true issue: “it’s a lack of feeling that is our problem.” The idea that empathy is at the forefront of antiracist pedagogy is not new; Leake (2016) explains, “advocates for teaching empathy champion its potential to address everything from bullying to social inequities, from bridging differences and to promoting prosocial practices.” 

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However, bridging multimodal composition with empathy and antiracist pedagogy has yet to be formally elaborated. While many of us writing instructors probably already enact bits and pieces of each pedagogical approach and while multimodal composition is in itself antiracist because it does move away from boxing students into Western and white literacy practices that traditional essays can often evoke, I also believe that the idea of various modes of communication as having the power to incite empathy and heighten cognitive activity is one that is understated. If we realize that multimodal composition has the capability for more empathetic responses, then why not couple this already highly beneficial approach with pedagogies of empathy and antiracism?